


high enough to see our fathers' houses

by weird_bird (2weird4)



Category: DCU (Comics), Deathstroke the Terminator (Comics)
Genre: Canon Gay Relationship, First Kiss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-19 22:48:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13133823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2weird4/pseuds/weird_bird
Summary: Joseph’s face shines with humor. Backslapping machismo glances off of Joseph, who has the arms of an artist and a core of purer power than they’ll ever know under an eggshell-blue sweatshirt. But it does make him laugh.





	high enough to see our fathers' houses

**Author's Note:**

> i was so disappointed to find zero content for these two, so here i am, making the tags.
> 
> possible triggers include consent issues, unhealthy relationship dynamics, anxiety, alcohol.
> 
>  _italics_ are ASL, "quotes" are spoken english.
> 
> title from ["day i die"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwZvip416NU) by the national [cw flashing for the video].

The pluck of a discordant note makes Dave turn, sheepish. “I’m almost finished with the design.” Dave pulls off his glasses and wipes them on the cloth laying on the desk beside him. He’s dismayed to find them dirtier than ever--ah, the cloth is at least as dusty as the desk now. 

_Take your time,_ Joseph tells him with the lift of a hand off his guitar. _I’m ready to try it as soon as you make the modification._

“It’s not ready for you yet.”

Setting his guitar down precisely in its case, Joseph crosses the room to lean over Dave’s desk. He positions his body so his shadow doesn’t fall over the spread of papers, but somehow, the stripe of his body heat still injects prickling awareness under Dave’s skin. 

Dave looks back down and modifies the schematic. “It’s not safe yet.”

Dave replaces his glasses and looks up again. 

_Let me._ Hooking the glasses off his face, Joseph tugs his shirt away from his stomach to clean them on the fabric. A youthful gesture for such a mature young man. Joseph must read the flicker over Dave’s face as distaste--with a caught-out grin, he plucks a fresh cloth from the top drawer where Dave himself has forgotten he keeps them and wipes off one lens with a slow circle of the thumb, then the other. Before Dave can move to replace his glasses, Joseph slides them onto his face, settling them neat on his temples. Every action performed with the care so native to him.

Dave has tied Joey's shoes, has tied Joseph’s ties. “You want to take a look?” He slides over the sheaf of papers. His phone buzzes, incessant. Guitar music drowned it out well enough before, but now it can't be ignored. Joseph has switched off his own phone, and with it, the subvocal communication. Quiet day.

 _Is it important?_ asks Joseph.

“Not at all.”

_Then why are you ignoring it?_

“This is important.” Joseph understands more than anyone how important this is to him. Dave is doing this for Joseph.

Joseph understands now, too. With a nod, he returns to his guitar, plucks something unplaceably peaceful.

Just as Dave relaxes back into focus, his phone buzzes again. Joseph did not ask, giving him the space to answer, “Some of my old buddies want to meet up for dinner.” Some of Slade’s friends, who are not always his friends, who might not even be his friends tonight.

_Anywhere good?_

“Excellent. A sports bar rated three-and-a-half stars.”

 _So you’re not going?_

Dave answers him with a look.

_Can I come?_

 

“All right, all right, scoot down.” 

Dave moves until his arm is up against Joseph’s arm. The sleeve of Joseph’s coat has caught a sparkle of snow miraculously clinging to life in the beer-warm bar, and just as Dave makes to flick it away, a heavy arm flops around Joseph’s shoulders and drags him in, rubbing his knuckles over his head.

“Wilson’s boy! Your dad’s a real bastard, you know that?”

Joseph’s mouth pulls at the corner, and his fingers flick, sardonic.

“He says, _Tell me something I don’t know,”_ Dave translates. The overcrowded table bursts into guffaws.

Protesting elbows, a few vacate to the bar halfway through a clammy, greasy dinner of wings and fries. It does not surprise Dave, but it does disappoint him that Joseph goes, too. Joseph loves people, but he needs air. Yet another reason Dave gave him the sky with his suit.

At the force of yet another brotherly blow to his shoulder-blade, Dave winces into his drink. For his efforts, beer splashes up the lenses.

Easing an elbow onto the bar, Joseph looks at him from across the crowded restaurant. Something wry at the corner of his mouth. _Good company._

 _Better food,_ Dave bites back, wiping the grease off his chin with practiced carelessness.

Joseph’s face shines with humor. Backslapping machismo glances off of Joseph, who has the arms of an artist and a core of purer power than they’ll ever know under an eggshell-blue sweatshirt. But it does make him laugh.

Eyes still on Joseph, a blur through blotted glasses, Dave fishes in his shirt pocket for the cloth.

 _Contact,_ mouths Joseph, the movement for his lips for Dave’s benefit, except that Dave doesn’t get the chance to move a muscle before Joseph is inside him. _Ish,_ Joey used to mouth, _Ish, come see._ Dave’s hands take off Dave’s glasses, and Dave’s hand finds the cloth folded up in the left pocket of his jeans, and Joseph wipes his glasses clean and returns them to his face, motionless across the restaurant.

 

Goodbyes drag out onto the strip of sidewalk across the restaurant, the crowd globbing together and eventually, dribbling off home. Dave feels trapped up against the dirty brick of the restaurant while Joseph steps around the streetlamp, texting someone. Maybe Rose, who doesn’t have the time for an old friend of her father’s. Not to say that Joseph does, but he always scrounges up dwindling hours, even if he is the only one. Especially if he is the only one.

“Not that you’d know,” someone jeers, jostling him. “You never had kids, lucky son of a bitch.”

“He’s gone and raised Wilson’s brats for him, anyway,” cuts in another. If they had names he once knew, Dave can’t think of them now, under a dozen mocking glances. Slade’s friends.

“That right, Doc? A little coparenting?” It sounds like a slur in their mouths.

For all Dave’s pride in Joseph, he was never his son.

Dinner sticky-heavy in his belly, Dave shakes back his sleeve to read the time trembling on his wrist. “We should do this again sometime.” 

_Let’s go home,_ Joseph signals under the puddle of light. When the world is a small town of gossips, an arm around the shoulder with a knife up the sleeve, home is people. A person.

Hand in farewell over his shoulder, Dave repeats “Work to get done” until they can’t hear him anymore, until he’s home.

 

“You don’t usually use your gift so lightly.” Dave always names it his gift, though when it comes to Joseph, _gift_ could mean any number of things: the fingertips that fret or the deep in his eyes, looking back at him as he plays.

To acknowledge any of what happened is to acknowledge that they ever left this room. In that regard, Joseph seems impervious as ever.

Dave sighs and then presses the panel on the suit seamlessly back into place. “Will you tell me why?”

Rarely do they deny each other a direct request, rarer still that it must be spoken. _Haven’t you ever wanted to get out of your skin?_ Joseph’s playing picks up speed, tune tripping out among the whir of machinery.

The first time Joey buried his face in Dave’s shoulder, small shoulders shaking as his tears seeped through his shirt, that was when his skin was worth living in.

Joseph slaps the body of the guitar like a lover, and Dave jerks in his seat. _Haven’t you ever wanted to be inside someone?_ That smirk. He is Slade’s, after all.

There’s not enough oxygen in the room for the next breath Dave takes. “You can try the suit in the morning.” His eyes move to the window. “It’s really snowing now.”

Lying the guitar down in its cradle, Joseph sheds the eggshell-blue sweatshirt and peels into the Ikon suit. Or so Dave infers by ears alone, as he has not looked from the window.

Joseph squeezes his upper arm before he brushes out the door. He is Slade’s son, but he is Dave’s friend. _I’m really glad I could talk to you about this, Ish,_ Joey told him once, backpack hanging off one shoulder, after Dave had made all the noise and Joey had done all the listening.

Throwing on a coat, Dave follows his trim steps in the fresh-fallen snow. “Joseph?” Dark woods around the house here; Slade never worried about sending the boy out, but Dave always wiped the frost from the glass door-panel to watch for him until Joey tramped back inside. “Joseph!”

A great, grappling weight on his back, and before fight-or-flight can even set in, a better instinct informs Dave there’s no need. Fast puffs by his ear, arms around his neck. _Ish,_ Joseph’s lips smudge out onto his temple. His gold-gloved hand swings around to say, _Got you._

Dave bends his neck, breathes out. Relief or nerves, relief and nerves. “Nicely done--” He lets out a _shriek_ as a scoop of snow avalanches under his shirt. He whirls around. He helped train this kid--

Joseph is too fluid, even in a friendly flight. He slips off, skips two steps, and takes to the air, Wilson and Kane and, yes, damn it, Isherwood’s, too. From on high, he lobs down icy palmfuls, thumping Dave in the chest, in the forehead, mellow mirth over patrician features.

Slade stole Joseph’s laugh. Dave will give them back, at his own expense if he must, but he pumps out a snowball because he went to war, too, damn it, damn this night, damn it all and damn him too.

 

 _The suit is safe,_ Joseph tells him after he pours him a cup of coffee.

“Was that what that was all about?” A towel and a change of clothes later, and Dave isn’t as chilled anymore, but the first hot black gulp still helps. He would have showered, but fifteen minutes is too long to waste when Joseph leaves in the morning, when he should have left that evening.

 _I was trying to cheer you up._ Nothing about Joseph’s face says otherwise. Snow-blanketed silence in the window behind his damp blond curls.

_There was no need._

 _You hated it,_ Joseph says piercingly, _back there._

 _I was…_ His hands hesitate. _I was fine after we came back._

On the inch of free desk space, he balances his coffee cup, the curve of his lips lyrical as he speaks. _I hated it too._

“Don’t put yourself through that next time,” Dave advises him, crossing his arms and tucking his hands underneath. 

He shakes his head. _I leave in the morning._

Joseph budgets every minute, too. Just thinking that makes Dave’s heart twist like saltwater taffy. “Come back if you have any issues with the suit.” Joseph’s nodding before he even finishes asking.

 _I’ll come back sooner._ Joseph steps over to him, and Dave thinks about his eyes bridging the space between them in the bar. His body heat makes every hair stand up on Dave’s arms.

Dave half-uncrosses his arms and seizes Joseph’s biceps, rucks up the sweatshirt some. “Of course. You’re always welcome,” he says woodenly. He can see his black pupils under dandelion-light lashes. It would be the sweetest mistake he could make. “No, Joseph, let’s think about this." He inhales the closing space between them. "Joey--”

 _Ish,_ he answers, a soft song against his mouth, warm as dark.

He always made it easy for Dave. _I’m learning a new piece,_ Joey would say, perching on the arm of the couch with the guitar that was a hair too big for his frame, _What are you working on?_ By David’s second worried glance following a rough mission with those kids he ran around with like a hero, Joey would hold out his arm to bandage and his hand for migraine meds. When Dave sent him a strategic email about potential applications of the mic app he told him he was developing on a whim, Joseph replied twelve minutes later, _Do you think we could modify that to work for me?_

What Joseph does for him, it's not taking his hand. It's more intimate than that. It's Joseph taking it out of his hands.

Green eyes dart open, and then David kisses him back.


End file.
